Italian Communist Party Bidding for More Power

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ROME, April 11—The Italian Communist party, by far the most powerful Marxist machine in the West, is making a bid for even more power.

The odds are that it will progress in the next few months, if only because of the tensions, quarrels, factionalism and personal rivalries within the non‐Communist center‐left coalition that governs Italy.

In every one of Rome's frequent governmental crises and near‐crises, the party, despite its own troubles, seems to be inching closer to what Italians call “the room with the pushbuttons.” That is the imaginary power center of the national Government that controls the provincial prefects and other bureaucrats, the state‐run industries, the state broadcasting monopoly, the police, the paramilitary carabinieri and the armed forces.

The 1.5‐million‐member Communist party already seems to have a foot in the door to the pushbuttons. Communist officials often deal with provincial prefects and police chiefs as if they were underlings, curtly telling them: “It's all settled in Rome.” The state television network has started calling the countries of Communist Eastern Europe. the socialist countries, and it sometimes sneers at the United States. Communist union leaders negotiate proposed legislation with Premier Emilio Colombo and his ministers before the Government sends bills to Parliament.

Yet the party, never monolithic, is strained by discord between pragmatists who would reform Italian society from within and those who accuse the pragmatists of having joined the country's “neocapitalistic” system instead of destroying it to make way for true socialism.

The Communist party is embarrassed—though not threatened—by a small schism of respected doctrinaires, grouped around the monthly II Manifesto (soon to become a four page daily), who proclaim Peking as their “point of reference” without being all‐out Maoists.

In the recent rightist‐led rebellion in Reggio Calabria some Communists joined the rioters, tearing up their party cards. In a flare‐up in L'Aquila late in February ultraleftists and neo‐Fascists stormed and sacked the local Communist headquarters.

Maoist students jeer at the Communist party as “bourgeois” and chant: “If China gives us rifles—civil war! If China gives us cannon—revolution, revolution!”

A new far‐left fringe of “Nazi‐Maoists” has added gun to the traditional hammerand‐sickle emblem on its red flags. In northern Italy the industrial guerrillas of such anarchist‐Communist factions as Continuing Fight and Red Brigades bomb plants, paralyze assembly lines in wildcat strikes, beat up shop stewards of the Communist‐led unions and shout at officials of the Fiat Motor Corporation: “You've got Indochina right in your factory!”

The election of a successor to President Giuseppe Saragat late this year offers a unique chance for Communist gains. The 1,020‐member assembly—deputies, senators and regional delegates—that will choose the head of state will probably be swung by 250‐odd Communist votes because the Christian Democrats and their allies seem unable to agree on a candidate and the hopefuls are eyeing the Communists.

Many Italians no longer ask whether the Communists will enter the Government, but when. The question of timing was put to the editor of a Communist newspaper; his straightfaced answer was, “But we are already in government”

Longo Described Role

The ailing party leader, Luigi Longo, explained in a recent article in the Soviet Communist party organ, Pravda, that he was heading “a government party in the sense that it has an important impact on all issues that affect the life of the great masses and the nation.”

An Italian diplomat commented: “Longa is quite right. His party may not get everything it wants. But nothing—well, almost nothing—can be done in Italy that the Communists don't want, and the Government often needs their tacit collaboration.”

Of Italy's 8,000 mayors 800 are Communists, and local government, with its patronage, is the party's most important power base. Party strength also rests on influence in the national Parliament, predominance in organized labor, an empire of party‐controlled cooperatives and other business enterprises, continuing Soviet subsidies, the appeal to intellectuals, and sheer numbers.

The party is second only to the Christian Democrats. In the last parliamentary election, in May, 1968, the Christian Democratic party polled 39.1 per cent of the popular vote, the Communists 26.9. In nationwide administrative elections last June the Christian Democrats won 37.9 per cent, the Communists 27.9.

The Communists voting strength has grown in almost every election since 1953, when they polled 22.3 per cent. Meanwhile there has been steady decline in card‐carrying membership, which was 2.6 million 18 years ago.

Signs of Decline at Polls

Analysts detected signs last year that Communist voting strength had begun decreasing. Regional elections in Sicily and municipal elections in Rome and some other big cities next June will show whether the Communist wave is significantly receding.

While the party remains formidable vote‐getter, its rank and file often look flabby. Student radicals and young workers spurn youth federations, party bureaucrats have country houses and there is a parking problem whenever a party section holds a meeting.

Communist functionaries sniff at the “adventurism” of the student movement and other rabid fractions to the left of the party, with their crash helmets, motor scooters and revolutionary talk, but the party is clearly worried.

It is even more worried about inchoate protest movements, especially in the south, that have slipped out of its control. Until recent months the Communist party was the natural leader of all postwar protest movements; suddenly it has found itself at the receiving end.

“It is absolutely urgent for us to spearhead discontent,” the party's Deputy Secretary General, Enrico Berlinguer, warned in a recent Central Committee debate on the groundswells in Reggio Calabria and L'Aquila.

Taking the Wrong Road

Mr. Berlinguer, who is the acting chief of the Communist apparatus as the 71‐year‐old Mr. Longo is becoming increasingly a figurehead, said that the party had erroneously taken the road of “workerism,” concentrating on labor's demands for more money while neglecting the unemployed, pensioners, the white‐collar class, young people, women and other restless and discontented groups.

“He of all people should talk like this,” a left‐wing member remarked afterward. “Berlinguer himself is the embodiment of the bureaucratic involution of our party, which has become part of the Establishment and lost touch with the masses.”

Communists say that Mr. Berlinguer, a frail and ascetic Sardinian, looked old when he headed the party's youth federation 20 years ago. Today, at age 48, he strikes foreigners as singularly un‐Italian — remote, taciturn and unsmiling — and like a Kremlin functionary.

Like many Sardinian names, Berlinguer sounds Catalan rather than Italian. The Communist leader's father and grandfather were renowned in Sardinia's radical politics.

Mr. Berlinguer emerged as a major figure in international Communism in a controversy with the Kremlin. At the world conference of 75 Communist parties in Moscow in June, 1969, he declared that the unity of the Communist movement must not be based on “outside constraint” and he refused to endorse the meeting's principal document, which sanctioned the Soviet‐led occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Since then Mr. Berlinguer has quietly brought about a reconciliation between his party and the Kremlin, muffling criticism of the Soviet Union by Italian Communists.

In a speech at the recent 24th Congress of the Soviet Communist party in Moscow( Mr. Berlinguer said that “dissent and divergencies” may at times occur between his party and other Communist parties, but he added that “we have always fought and will always fight manifestations of antiSovietism.”

Dependence on Soviet Help

One reason for the new acquiescence is the party's continued dependence on Soviet funds. When an Italian Communist official was asked about a recent sharp attack on Peking by the party magazine Vie Nuove, he explained in an offhand way: “Oh, the Soviet Embassy pays for Vie Nuove.” Moscow pays for much more.

Informed estimates place the party budget at about $25million annually, with more than half coming from secret sources. The secrecy of ?? is flimsy. Most Italian businessmen Who trade with the Soviet bloc pay what amounts to kickbacks to the party through import‐export companies.

How candid the party is in its financial statements could be deducted from a recent disclosure by Finance Minister Luigi Preti that it had reported to the tax authorities that it had 25 full‐time employes earning $57,600 in 1970. The Christian Democratic party reported 830 full‐time employes.

Anyone setting foot in the fortress‐like Communist headquarters in Via delle Botteghe Oscure near Rome's principal Jesuit church, or in one of the provincial federation offices, sees a teeming bureaucracy employing thousands.

It is widely assumed that some industrialists are subsidizing the party or labor unions it controls to avoid trouble.

Overtures to Red China,

While Mr. Berlinguer has been mending party fences with the Soviet bloc, he has also sought to re‐establish contacts with Peking, severed for eight years. He encouraged the party organ, L'Unita, to send one of its editors, Alberto Jacoviello, on a tour of Communist China. But when Mr. Jacoviello's articles glowingly pictured the Chinese after the Cultural Revolution as an antlike “people of philosophers” who spurned material incentives and enthusiastically gave up the last vestiges of individual life, Italian party members muttered.

An official of the central control commission, the party's watchdog body, said: “Are we going to tell our intellectuals to dig canals and carry pails of earth on their heads every morning?”

Communist intellectuals smoke American cigarettes, drink Scotch and flirt with countesses at the cocktail parities of Western diplomats. They are allowed to chide the Soviet Union, gently, for its treatment of Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn or of Jews who want to emigrate to Israel. Paese Sera, the popular pro‐Communist newspaper in Rome, will print such mild criticism.

The party, which has always pampered its tribe of intellectuals, was founded in 1921 by a group of students at Turin University, among them Antonio Gramsci, who died in 1937 after 11 years in Fascist jails, and the late Palmiro Togliatti, who spent many years in Moscow and was the leader when the party. became legal after the Mussolini era ended in 1945.

Until his death in 1964 Mr. Togliatti cultivated a liberal image that attracted writers, film directors, artists and scientists. The party rewarded sympathetic intellectuals without requiring them to become members and observe strict discipline.

Thus Carlo Levi, the author of “Christ Stopped in Eboli," was put on the Communist ticket as an independent and elected to the Senate.

Even frankly pro‐Moscow members of the apparatus stress that the “Italian road to socialism” differs from the Soviet model. A high party official who pays frequent visits to the Soviet Union and is known to socialize with Soviet diplomats in Rome explained to an American: “Take any Italian—he has thousands of years of history, civilization, thought and art behind him, all the way back to the Etruscans. You ‘lust can't apply to him the methods that may be all right for crude Russian peasants.”

The Italian road has led the Communist party within nodding distance of the Vatican. Mr. Togliatti forbade harsh anticlericalism and paid the Roman Catholic Church a compliment in 1947 by ordering all Communists in the Constituent Assembly to vote for Article 7 of the post‐Fascist Constitution endorsing the 1929 treaty between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI that regulated churchstate relations and gave the church privileged status.

A thaw under Pope John XXIII followed the cold‐war anti‐communism of Pope Plus XII. The audience granted by Pope John to the daughter of Nikita S. Khrushchev and her husband, Aleksei I. Adhzubei, in 1963 was “worth a million votes for the Communist party in Italy,” conservatives say.

Since 1963 a great deal has happened in the church and among Italian Catholics. The Association of Christian Workers, a grassroots movement, has drifted toward Marxism. Priests and laymen engage in debate with Communists. Pope Paul VI has received Soviet officials in the Vatican and sent his “foreign minister,” Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, to Moscow.

‘Dialectical Dialogue’ Urged

Even in the Christian Democratic party, still Italy's main bulwark against Communism, left‐wing factions call for “a dialectical dialogue” with the Communists. Militant antiCommunists even suspect some Christian Democrats of Machiavellian long‐range designs for a “black‐red” partnership in power with the Communist party.

Premier Colombo acknowledges that the party is “a real force with deep roots in Italian society.” Some Christian Democrats to his left, maintaining that only the Communists can guarantee a measure of order, with fewer strikes and less violence, contend that by gaining ever more respectability and responsibility the Communist party will make itself increasingly independent of Moscow and may eventually be won for Western‐style democracy. “Look at Bologna,” they

With half a million people, Bologna is the largest Communist‐ruled city between Prague and Havana. The 26‐year‐old Communist administration has kept reasonably free of the major scandals that have, embroiled the Christian Democratic city fathers of Rome.

Bologna's historic nucleus of medieval towers and arcaded palaces has remained uncluttered by the concrete boxes that mar many once‐lovely piazzas elsewhere in Italy. Its streets seem cleaner than most. Whenever a resident wants a birth certificate or other official papers needed all the time to placate the bureaucracy, he goes to a “little city hall” near his home where the terminal of an American‐built computer system provides a printout from the municipal records.

Equally efficient is the Communist party establishment, controlling about everything in Bologna down to the cooperative at the railroad station that sells box lunches with lasagne and Lambrusco wine. The party is polite to the church and benevolent to businessmen. Mayor Renato Zangheri, a university professor with an easy smile, will tell any visitor that the Italian model of Communism respects private property and initiative and seeks broad alliances with all democratic

‘Let's All Work Together’

“Let's all work together” is also the motto of Guido Fanti, a strapping, genial former Mayor and a Bologna Communist who is the president of the new Emilia‐Romagna regional government. As the administrative head of an area with 3.75 million people, Mr. Fanti deals with all departments of the national Government and is building a regional bureaucracy that is to take over important functions like supervising local police forces and regulating agricul. ture.

Mr. Fanti governs the region with the help of the far‐left Proletarian Socialist Unity party, an ally of the Communists throughout the country. In the regional parliament he tries to reach consensus also with the Christian Democratic opposition—and often succeeds.

In the other Communist‐gov erned regions, Tuscany and Umbria, the Communists and Proletarian Socialists share power with the Socialist party, the strongest group in Italy's fractured socialist camp. The same Socialist party that helps Communists control the new regional governments in Florence and Perugia participates in the national Government under Mr. Colombo, who has repeatedly promised to keep the Communist party out of power.

That is just one of Italy's many political paradoxes. Another is the socio‐economic profile of the “Red Belt,” EmiliaRomagna, Tuscany and ‘Umbria.

Why is Communism so strong in those relatively affluent regions rather than in Calabria, where per capita income is only 45 per cent that in EmiliaRomagna? Why is that region a Red citadel while its neighbor to the east, Venetia, votes massively Christian Democratic every time? Why, for that matter, does Leghorn, in Tuscany, always vote heavily Communist and Lucca, only 30 miles away, always vote anti‐Communist?

Deep Historical Roots

Tentative explanations reach, far back into history—to the communal feuds of the Middle Ages and the temporal power of the church, which fostered anticlericalism in such places as Bologna and Perugia. The World War II resistance movement, much stronger in the north than in central and southern Italy, which were liberated, earlier, also paved the way for Communist power.

A recent surge in neo‐Fascist militancy and the discovery of an ultrarightist plot (with farcical overtones) provided new opportunities for the Communists to muscle into the center‐left camp with the help of antiFascist fronts.

Ignazio Silone, the writer and Democratic Socialist who helped establish the Italian Communist party and, as an anti‐Fascist, spent many years in exile, says he does not believe in the possibility of a Fascist coup. Alluding to the Communist party, he says that Fascism is a totali tarian regime that can be imposed with the slogan “Down with Fascism!”

The real danger for Italy in 1971, according to Mr. Silone. is not represented by rightist plotting but by “the possible mistakes of the democrats.”